Dale Loves Sophie to Death (31 page)

Leo spent several long evenings sitting in the square, contemplating that handsome statue, which towered over the young trees installed by the Marshal County Ladies Garden Club. It was his first inkling of the fickleness of legend, the ease with which one is misled by myth. He wrote a letter of deep and sincere apology but did not hear again from Mrs. Marcus Dowd, nor had he expected to.

He was young and perhaps still a little brash, but he was not an insensitive man, and he applied this glimpse of the possible effect of grief to his own circumstances, admonishing himself to take all the good fortune of his business and his marriage much less for granted. The spirit of expansiveness that had characterized his outlook up until the receipt of that letter was checked somewhat over the year that followed, and as his business ventures grew increasingly complicated, as his house took shape day by day, as his infatuation with his new wife inevitably grew more complex and profound, he became a man of a fairly solemn nature.

T
he three houses built just north of Monument Square in the early 1880s for Leo, John, and George Scofield fronted on a semicircular drive and shallow common ground that in the summer became a crescent of feathery grass that bent in bright green ripples across the lawn in the slightest breeze. In time the grass at the inner curve of the drive gave way to a golden velvet moss under the elms as the trees matured and produced heavy shade all summer long.

The houses were comfortable though not grand. They were well built and nicely spaced, one from the other, and for a number of years those three south-facing houses marked the northernmost edge of the town of Washburn, Ohio. During the several years the houses were under construction, and long after, the residential property of those three brothers was known all over town simply as Scofields, whereas the twenty-odd buildings comprising the flourishing engine-manufacturing business of Scofields & Company, begun as no more than a foundry in 1830 by Leo’s grandfather, had for some time been referred to merely as the Company.

The second Sunday of September 1888, on either side of a muddy wagon track that led into the east yard of his new house, Leo Scofield, at age thirty-seven, planted eight pairs of cultivated catalpa saplings. Six days later, on Saturday the fifteenth, there occurred the unusual incident of the births—all within a twelve-hour span—of his first and his brother John’s second child—a daughter and son respectively—and of the third child of Daniel Butler, a good friend and pastor of the Methodist church. John and Lillian Scofield’s first child, Harold, born in 1883, had died before he was a year old, so the Scofields’ compound had been childless for some time.

Some years earlier Leo had given up the idea that he and his wife, Audra, would have children. His wife was twenty-nine years old with this fourth pregnancy, and through the early months they both had dreaded and expected another miscarriage. They had been married for eight years when Lily was born. The planting of those young catalpa trees was only a coincidence, of course; Leo hadn’t intended any sort of commemoration, but in spite of himself he developed a superstitious interest in the welfare of those trees. He had started them himself from seed six years earlier, and they were just barely established enough to transplant. Several days after his daughter’s birth, when it was clear she and his wife and the other mothers and babies were thriving, his brother John and he walked the lane he had created, staking the saplings when necessary to guide them straight.

“And on the ides of the month, John,” Leo said. “It’s an amazing thing! All the Scofields are born on the ides of the month.” Leo’s birthday was March fifteenth, and his youngest brother George’s was the fifteenth of October. John’s birthday was February fifth, when he would turn thirty.

“Well, but this is September, Leo. The ides of the month was on Thursday. On the thirteenth, this month.” But Leo wasn’t paying close attention, and John himself, not born on the ides, was just as happy to be a little disburdened of “Scofieldness.” He followed along, helping his brother. “But this is really something, isn’t it, Leo?” John said. “Here we are. Two
papas.
Only three days ago, Leo—three
days
ago!—we were…fancy-free. We were just
not
papas.”

Leo glanced sharply at John but didn’t reply for a moment. He was an elegant figure among the little sloping trees, which were leaning this way and that. Leo was one of those men no more than average height who are somehow imposing because they possess an inherent certainty, a lack of hesitancy, an easy assumption of authority. “No, you’re right about that, John. You’re right about that. Three days ago we were only two
husbands
.”

John had squatted to secure the burlap around the spindly trunk of one of those young trees, and he aimed a considering look Leo’s way and finally grinned, acknowledging the edge of chastisement in his brother’s voice and feeling a genuine joyousness spike through him at all his sudden connection to the wide world. “Ah, Leo. Don’t you think this’ll make a good husband of me? Don’t you imagine I get a clean slate now? The first baby…Leo, that nearly killed Lillian. And me, too.” John’s ebullience abruptly fell away. “But Lillian was just…It was like she had broken. That was it. That was what she must have been feeling,” he mused. “But I was so stupid. I was just scared to death. I didn’t know what it took…That poor little boy. Poor Harold! I couldn’t
do
anything to help, though, Leo! It nearly drove me crazy to see Lillian so sad.

“But this one’s so…he’s so
lively
, Leo. Why, he hardly stays still a minute. Healthy as a horse! And I haven’t even raised a glass to toast their health. I haven’t touched a drop, Leo. And I won’t. I won’t.” Then John fell back into his usual wry tone, which signified that it was at the listener’s own peril to take him entirely seriously. “I’ll start all over with the lovely Lillian. And I can, you know. Because at least
she
loves me more than you do,” he said, but with a lilting, teasing cadence.

Leo watched John a moment as he stooped to hammer in a stake at an angle that would pull the rope tight, and he thought that even in so small a task his brother was graceful in the uncommon way with which he was at ease in his own body. “There isn’t anyone in the world who doesn’t love you, John. But that might not be such a good thing,” he said, and he was quite serious.

“You’re harder on me than anyone, Leo. Even Dan Butler’s not so stern!” John straightened up and exhaled a short laugh, leaning his head back to take in the pale sky. “You’ll have to go a little easy on me, you know. I’ve got to get used to it, still! It’s wonderful that they’re all healthy. As strong as can be. Lillian…and Audra and Martha Butler…everyone doing so well.
All
of them,” he said. “I can hardly believe it!” They moved along, carefully wrapping the tender trunks before they looped and staked the guide ropes.

Leo had left the planting late because it had been an edgy summer and so dry that he had to haul water until the middle of November to irrigate that double row of saplings. The memory of June, July, and August merged into a blur of heat. The days had stretched out dry and hot, eventually falling into unsettling yellow green evenings preceding night after night of crackling thunder and hailstorms that lingered over the town with great bluster but produced very little measurable rainfall.

It had been a season that was not much good for planting, and a season that had produced a sort of communal unease, transforming the nearly simultaneous births in mid-September of Lillian Marshal Scofield, Warren Leonard Scofield, and Robert Crane Butler into an event that seemed less remarkable than inevitable. And the unwavering alliance of those three children took on the same quality of inevitability. Lily and Robert and Warren were rarely apart from one another during all the waking hours of their early youth.

But during the first months following his daughter’s birth, when the heat finally loosened its grip and September led into one of those autumns of rare clarity in which everything seems to be in perfect balance, Leo made grand plans for his garden. In late November he stood in the wagon yard on a chilly but glorious day so dazzlingly clear that the air itself was charged with a blue translucent brilliance. He stood still and imagined the plot transformed. He became lost in the idea of abundant flowers, blooming bushes, towering trees.

The catalpas stood in fragile regulation, spare sticks once their leaves had dropped. They looked forlornly tenuous on the clear-cut acreage where the Scofield brothers had built their three houses. But by the time Lily was seven months old the following spring and those shoulder-high saplings finally budded and then leafed out, Leo privately exulted at their survival of the unusually brutal, snowless winter.

Leo Scofield was a good businessman, always a little skeptical, a trifle suspicious by nature. But he wasn’t at all prone to melancholy; his brooding followed a more pragmatic course—he might fret persistently, for instance, about a minor innovation to a Scofield engine or an antiquated valve design. But it was quite in character, in late April of 1889, when he was a year closer to forty years old than to thirty-five, that the notion of the future flying toward him was only exhilarating. He wasn’t at all troubled by the idea of his own mortality. He walked the rutted track between those newly planted trees and imagined his daughter’s wedding procession making its way along a raked gravel avenue beneath the catalpas’ eventual leafy canopy under an overarching clear blue sky.

And during the years of Lily’s childhood it was a great pleasure for him on the hottest summer days to sit in his fledgling garden, stunned by the Ohio heat and the salty yellow scent of cut grass, with her light, fluting voice ringing out above her playmates’ as she directed her cousin Warren and little Robert Butler in some game she had devised.

Leo was continually surprised by and enamored of the solace of the domesticity he had happened into, and in a span of twenty years he transformed that scrubby patch of land into his idea of a replica of an English garden made up entirely of plants native to Ohio. The catalpa trees, however, didn’t mature exactly as he had hoped. In fact, he realized three years too late that he had intended to plant an avenue of yellow poplars—stately, flowering trees known locally as tulip trees. But when he had firmly fixed on the idea of his garden, had planned the east yard entrance, and had described the tree he had in mind, asking around town where he might find it, it was probably in the description of the tree’s flowers that he had gone wrong. Leo never gave up the private notion, however, that the misinformation he had received was purposeful, that there might be someone in the world who was amused at his expense, and with solicitous pruning he coaxed the catalpas to assume a more elegant shape than was their unbridled inclination.

As the years passed, Leo came to like the pungency of a blooming catalpa, which was heavily sweet but elusive at a distance, drifting over the garden unexpectedly. He admired the tree’s soft green heart-shaped leaves, its abundantly frilled flowers, as showy as a flock of tropical birds in the rolling landscape of central Ohio. Daniel Butler, who had done missionary work in Brazil and Cuba, said that in midsummer, when the vining trumpet creeper overran the arbor, dripping with deep-throated red-orange blossoms, the entire garden took on a look of the tropics. Leo had nurtured that flowering vine from a single cutting he had taken from a plant growing on a pasture fence—just a slip of stem cut on the diagonal and wrapped in a handkerchief he had moistened in the ditch alongside the road. The afternoon he had rounded a bend and come upon the glorious trumpet vine cascading over an unpainted board fence, he had paused for a long time before he had stooped to dampen his clean handkerchief in the brackish water. He was careful of his dignity, and his fascination with and cultivation of his flower garden was the only frivolity he allowed himself.

Even though Leo had forced the sturdy trunks of the catalpas to extend straight up about nine feet before they branched, each tree assumed the self-contained shape of a softened, rounded obelisk. Their crowns didn’t form the leafy vault he had hoped for—the branches didn’t
arch
, didn’t intermingle overhead, really, as he had envisioned. And each year, when the catalpas’ fringed and ruffling flowers bloomed and produced their startlingly phallic cigar-brown fruit, and when those flowers began to shed in stringy drifts of petals and oily pollen so that guests arrived showered with residue from the burgeoning branches, Audra would declare that the trees should be taken out.

“They’re a nuisance, Leo. I always think that if you want a flowering tree you can’t go wrong with a dogwood. Dogwoods won’t get so tall, of course, but they are such beautiful trees. And more restrained when they’re in bloom. Oh, and sometimes in the spring when the dogwoods bloom early, it looks to me like the whole tree has burst into white lace.” But the catalpa trees remained, and Leo’s garden and the wide yards of Scofields became the geographical context of the childhood of each of those three children born coincidentally on September 15, 1888.

Robert Butler was a ruddy, brown-haired child, and Warren Scofield, too, was sturdy and round limbed. They were little boys who seemed all of a piece, whereas Lily’s pale, attenuated arms and legs, her fragile neck, her knobby wrists and ankles seemed flimsy, as if, in her always hectic activity, she might fly apart, although for a long time it was clearly Lily who was the center and star of that inseparable threesome. At four or five or six years old, Robert wouldn’t have known how to articulate the impression that sometimes, in the blue or brassy light of any given day, a word Lily spoke—just the plain, flat sound of it—exploded cleanly into the moment, like a brilliant asterisk glinting through the atmosphere. Nor could he have explained that occasionally Lily’s movements, a sweep of her arm, an abrupt turning of her head, would break through some ordinary instant with a flicker of blank white clarity.

And, of course, Robert had no way to know that his was a kind of perception lost to adults and older children. His mother was happier to see him only in Warren’s company. Mrs. Butler didn’t dislike Lily; it was only that it gave her a sense of satisfaction to see those two healthy boys absorbed entirely in the company of each other. Robert and Warren appeared to strike a natural balance between them that was disturbed when little Lily was with them, directing them to do this or that, dreaming up fantastic games with evolving rules that were played out for days at a time.